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Advertising – the good and the bad
We all want to get paid. As ‘free’ continues to become the norm for data, information, apps and services, developers reach to advertising to fill the ‘P’ part of their profit and loss statements. Internet revenue hit $7.3 billion in Q1 this year, according to PwC – so someone must be clicking those ads. With…
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Who cares if you’re doing scrum or not?
Have you ever heard the question: “Are you doing Scrum? I mean, really doing scrum?” Or: “If I take the Scrum textbook practices, but change one or two things to suit my business, software or people, is that still Scrum?” At the Agile Lean Europe Unconference in Berlin yesterday there was quite a bit of…
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Software update cycle: faster every day
My Atari 2600 never got a firmware update. Not a single one. Neither did any of the game cartridges that came with it. In the early days of software, ‘soft’ware was really just a different kind of hardware. It was built, packaged and shipped exactly once. If you shipped it with a bug, that bug…
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SCRUM User Stories, Part 2: User value over business value?
My last post about User Stories and putting the value for the user first in any product decision generated some great discussion on Twitter. As with anything there are some varying views on the topic, and as one example I was pointed to Liz Keogh’s post on user stories. Liz argues that User Stories should…
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SCRUM User Stories: As a User, NOT As a Manager
The success or failure of a piece of software, or any product for that matter, is how well its users are satisfied, and how well it solves their needs. In the world of web software, adding functionality is rarely the differentiating factor that will lead to the winning product. More likely the winner is the…
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Move fast
The world moves fast. Your competitors move fast with it. Users move fast, too. Users are more fickle than ever before. This month’s UK WIRED magazine rated Twitter as “tired”. This for a service that’s only five years old with a still-growing userbase. Ouch! In the world of web products, building and releasing beautiful and…
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Classic product management wisdom from one of the fathers of industrial design
In 1955 Henry Dreyfuss, one of the most influential industrial designers of the 20th century, in his book “Designing for People” wrote the following : “The successful performer in this new field is a man of many hats. He does more than merely design things. He is a businessman as well as a person who…
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The most important career skill for this century: fixing what’s broken
Companies are a complicated beasts. Reporting lines, structures, process, heirarchy, politics… finding your way through the corporate maze and working out how to get things done and ship meaningful work can be tough. If you look around in any company, I’m sure you’ll see things that don’t make sense. You’ll see ineffective managers and inefficient…
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Driving innovation with agile: a short case study
A prototype of the first mouse We all know the story – but it’s still remarkably easy to forget that some of the most influential innovations in the field of personal computing, including the mouse, the laser printer, computer generated bitmap graphics and the graphical user interface, were not invented by Microsoft or Apple, but…
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User testing: an input to innovation, not a source of it
Benz “Velo” model (1894) It’s hard to imagine a life without cars. Before the automobile was invented getting around was a costly and particularly time-consuming business. That quick drive to the hardware store that takes 15 minutes in the car might have taken several hours on horseback, or an entire day in a horse-drawn carriage.…